As a Phi Beta Kappa member and a graduate of the University of Virginia (MA 1988), I'm pretty sure Virginia parents want goodness, truth and beauty for their children and not more "School of Darkness."

Telling by other comments, the unions have apparently turned out all hands in opposition to these "Model Guidelines."  As communist "educator" Bella Dodd observed in the 1930s, unions do this in order to preserve their support for the causes of what today we know as "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse!"  Just by attempting to insert critical theory into the school curriculum--even under surreptitious new labels--these organizations, backed by their apparatchiks in government, and their fellow travelers in our communities, have abdicated all credibility as educators and established themselves as an even more virulent form of propagandist than Dodd, who predated child-sex "researcher" Alfred Kinsey and sex-energy theorist (and inventor of the orgone accumulator) Wilhelm Reich, could have imagined.  Sex--not gender, mind you--is now a key front in the revolutionary movement to liberate children from their parents.  This situation demands that, no, we must not trust teachers and their unions for exercising judgment about these matters.  Unfortunately, we will have to do this for them.  Otherwise, we subject our children to use as pawns in the same sick power games as Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks, the Frankfurt School--supplemented with Kinsey and Reich--and now the modern summation of all Marxist counterfeit ideas, critical gender and race theories, have continued to play since 1917.  

If they can dictate our pronouns, there's nothing they cannot make us do.   As Marcuse's famous phrase "repressive tolerance" implies, a mind can be a terribly useful thing once wasted on "openness."  In a post-Alfred Kinsey world, some things need to stay closed, at least until parents decide to open them.

Indeed, the one hallmark of a true education has always been intellectual standards, shared universally irrespective of place or time.  Mastery of these standards is the only key to genuine progress.  People can disagree, as long as they share standards for thought and for discourse.  Unionized so-called "educators" have purchased power by pawning away intellectual standards in exchange for the fake currency of the grand Marxist oppression myth.  This oversimplified panacea always comes at the cost of authentic "openness" to goodness, truth and beauty.  If all topics from math to biology can be reduced to the simple dialectical trope of the oppression myth--liberating animals from the farmers, for example, or people from their own human physiology--then the principle of non-contradiction can be jettisoned wholesale.  Outrage is sufficient where once one had to demonstrate understanding of the adversary's perspective.  Most important, equivocal language can be used without detection.  Words no longer must be interchangeable with their definitions through every step of a proof.  Thus, good can be labeled arbitrarily as bad.  Truth is made offensive, and ugly mandated--all at the whim of the "educator."  Critical theorist Robin Lakoff hints in her Language Wars at how subversive this is; court cases are no longer about guilt or innocence but about race and sex.  Without intellectual standards, glittering social generalities--diversity, inclusion, and equity--can be elevated above the timeless cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude.  In effect, just as bad money chases good money out of circulation, such counterfeit ideas chase intellectual standards into back alleys mostly to enrich the counterfeiters enormously.  

These are only a few basic reasons the VDOE Model Guidelines are necessary.  There are trustworthy teachers out there, but they and our children are facing a stacked deck, just as the swarm of union-approved "trust the teachers" comments indicate.  Bella Dodd told us as much, but we haven't listened.  There is a tremendous power grab underway, not for our children's minds but for their behavior.  When enough of them have been conditioned and their behavior regimented, they will be turned against us all.  Lenin wanted literate children so they could all read Pravda.  Today's "open-thinkers" want cultural theorists so they will all agitate unthinkingly and uncritically, as instructed and when.  The Model Guidelines in fact require very little, but they do place one or two degrees of separation between our children and the critical theory teammates of Alfred Kinsey & Wilhelm Reich.  The VDOE guidelines thus relieve honest teachers from the burden of service to the "School of Darkness" and allow them to get back to teaching the kind of things that set our children on the path for lifetimes pursuing goodness, truth, and beauty, unbounded by race or sex and in the fullest sense of those terms.